I shall perhaps fall under the suspicion of morbid sensitiveness when I confess that I never took my weekly wage in London without a qualm and a compunction, for I could never make myself believe that I had really earned it.  What had I done?  I had simply performed a few arithmetical processes which any schoolboy might have done as well.  My labour, such as it was, was absorbed instantly in the commercial operations of a great firm.  I could not trace it, and I had no means of estimating its value.  The money I took for it seemed therefore to come to me by a sort of legerdemain.  That some one thought it worth while to pay me was ostensible proof that my work was really worth something; but so little able was I to penetrate the processes that resulted in this judgment, so vivid was the sense of some ingenious jugglery in the whole business, that I did not know whether I had been cheated or was a cheat, in living by a kind of labour that cost me so little.  How different was my feeling now!  At the end of an hour’s spade-work, I saw something actually done, of which I was the indisputable author.  When I laid down the saw and plane and hammer, and stretched my aching back, I saw something growing into shape, which I myself had created.  There was no jugglery about this; there was immediate intimate relation between cause and effect.  And thence I found a kind of joy in my work, which was new and exquisite to me.  I stood upon my own feet, self-possessed, self-respecting, efficient for my own needs, and conscious of a definite part in the great rhythm of infinite toil which makes the universe.  It is only when a man works for himself that this kind of joy is felt.  So enamoured was I of this new joy, that had it been possible I would have possessed nothing that was not the direct result of my own labour.  I would have liked to have spun the wool for my own clothes, and have tanned the leather for my own boots.  I would have liked to grow the corn for my own bread, and have killed my own meat, as the savage or the primitive settler does.  In this respect the savage or the primitive settler approaches much nearer the true ideal of human life than the civilised man, for the true ideal is that every man shall be efficient for his own needs, with as little dependence as possible on others.

Under natural conditions there is enough faculty in a man’s ten fingers to supply his own needs, and all the avocations needful to life may meet under one hat.  The familiar illustration of the number of men required to make a pin is typical of that contemptible futility to which what is called civilisation reduces men by mere dispersal of labour.  Such dispersal develops single faculties, but paralyses men.  It is like developing some single part of the human organism, such as a finger-tip, to high sensitiveness, by drawing away the sensitiveness from all the rest.  To do this reduces life to barrenness; it makes it meagre in energy and pleasure; it makes work a disease.